Wednesday, February 8, 2017

“How the Light Gets In” by Louise Penny

An elderly woman
is found dead in her small Montreal home. She had just visited the village of
Three Pines, and was packing to return where she had found love, warmth, and
friendship. But someone struck her dead. The crime wasn’t a robbery gone bad; nothing
was stolen. Her suitcase was on the bed, mostly packed.

Technically, the
crime is out of jurisdiction for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec
Surete Homicide Division. But the investigating officer for the Montreal police
is an old friend, he wants to leave foe his Christmas holiday, and Gamache is
more than glad to take over.

Gamache needs to
take over. He needs an excuse for visiting Three Pines without arousing
suspicion of his superiors at the Surete. Something big is building. Gamache
doesn’t know what it is, but he knows it’s bad. And it involves his superior
officer, Sylvain Francouer.

What Gamache
learns early on is that the dead woman is the last of the famous quintuplets
born in Quebec during the Depression of the 1930s (the quints and their family in
this story are based loosely on the real-life Dionne quintuplets).

Gamache is assisted
by his sergeant Isabelle Lacoste. His regular sergeant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, the
young man Gamache loves like a son, is now estranged, co-opted by Francouer and
in a downward spiral of addiction to painkillers, an addiction happily facilitated
by Francoeur. And there’s more: Lacoste is the only personally recruited
detective Gamache has left; Francouer has trashed his department and replaced
Gamache’s people with political lackeys.

And something
big is building. Something bad. And evil.

How
the Light Gets In is
the ninth Inspector Gamache detective novel by Canadian author Louise Penny. The enmity between Gamache
and Francoeur has been building for several books now, and here it breaks out
into the open. Here all the cards are on the table, and only one winner will
emerge from the rivalry.

Louise Penny

The book, with a
title based on the line of a song by the late Leonard Cohen, is a tension-filled
page-turner (I mean that literally; I woke up at 1:30 in the morning to finish
the last 100 pages). It didn’t help to know that there are two novels remaining
in the series; Penny does unexpected but real things with her regular characters,
and isn’t above sending them to prison, making them disappear, or even killing
them off.

Woven into the
fabric of this suspenseful duel is the story of the quintuplets and what
happened to them. The Dionne babies were actually born in neighboring Ontario
instead of Quebec, where Penny places her fictional children. Gamache will
eventually solve this crime as well.

How the Light Gets In is riveting, a creative mystery filled
with unexpected developments and characters with whom you want to sit next to a
fire, drink a glass a wine, and much some of the bread baked by Gabri and
Olivier at their Three Pines bistro.

My anguish is
that there are only three Inspector Gamache novels left to read, and I read them
faster than Penny writes them.

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Professional writer exploring faith and culture, life and work; happily married to Janet, the love of my life; father of two grown sons. Award-winning speechwriter and communication consultant. I am an editor for TweetSpeak Poetry and the author of the novels "Dancing Priest," "A Light Shining," and "Dancing King," and the non-fiction book "Poetry at Work."